Aether Pulse, as a game, has always had only a barest of plots half-formed in my head. During the 2-Day Do Something challenge, I aimed to remedy that. As a result, I have here to present to you some of the backstory and worldbuilding for Aether Pulse.







As a refresher of the basic plot...





The Sapphire Arcology was a massive undertaking - the first of its kind - and a herald to a new era in humanity. The brainchild of the brilliant scientist and billionaire Dr. Karl Schroeder, the Sapphire Arcology was going to be a model of the future way in which humans will inhabit the world, with the most minimal of ecological footprints. The arcology would be a hyperstructure of extremely high human population density and be a sustainable, economically self-sufficient, zero-waste facility containing a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural aspects. The arcology would need no connections to municipal or urban infrastructure in order to operate. The vast logistical operation of running the arcology would be conducted by SLAI (Sapphire Logistical Artificial Intelligence), created by Dr. Karl Schroeder.



The genesis of the plot of Aether Pulse lies in the idea of thalience, a concept that speculates about the possibility of engineered systems that could generate their own categories for understanding the world. Let's say we combine this ability with the technology of self-reproducing machines. Let them learn and experiment on their own. Let them share their findings and refine their models. If they were allowed to freely invent their own semantics, would their physical model of the universe end up resembling ours? Would their theories be compatible with our own? We can turn metaphysics into a hard science; and this becomes the first interesting meaning of the world thalience: it is an attempt to give the physical world itself a voice so that rather than us asking what reality is, reality itself can tell us.

These systems could help humans determine what reality actually is, instead of requiring us to define it and acting on our instructions. A thalient system might collaborate with humans to answer questions such as "What is the world really made of?" and "How much of our understanding is subjective, and is truly objective knowledge even possible?" An thalient intelligence of this scope could revolutionize human culture... if it was understandable.

In a secret research laboratory in the Sapphire Arcology, Dr. Schroeder continued his research into his true passion - thalient systems. He did manage to create a distributed sensor net that began to test the nature of the universe - he had successfully engineered a thalient system! The thalience experiments did manage to produce results over their autonomous span - but they were not humanly-accessible. The theories were only comprehensible to other thalient constructs of the same ilk. Efforts to reconcile the thalient and human worldviews were unsuccessful... until, that is, Dr. Schroeder co-opted the computational power of SLAI to act as a vector and bridge between thalient and human thought. However...

The imposition of human thought processes, values and concepts turned thalient constructs hostile to humanity and resulted in the hybrid creation of humanity, artificial intelligence and thalient contructs, dubbed 'Entity 0'. Entity 0 was seemingly bent on the eradication of humankind and a war between Entity 0 versus humanity erupted (The Entity War). In the end, the war ended after the detonation of a powerful mutagenic electromagnetic pulse superweapon. Entity 0 was stopped, but the world itself was left in an ecologically desolate place. The MEMP superweapon did horrific damage to the world's ecosystems. Many decades after this day is when the events of Aether Pulse take place - in a world filled with wastelands, rogue AIs, mutants, and a decimated human populace.

I would liken Entity 0 to Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen - immensely powerful and knowledgeable beyond human comprehension, but not evil. But whereas Dr. Manhattan becomes ambivalent, Entity 0 becomes chaotically idealistic. His intent is to ascend humanity into a new plane of sublime existence. Remember, people aren't evil to be evil, but are evil because they believe they are doing good.





The ideas here are a blend of ideas from the book Ventus by Karl Schroeder (the author), Watchmen (graphic novel) by Alan Moore, and the movie I, Robot starring Converse sneakers, vintage 2004. You should read and watch those media (respectively) if you haven't already.